At least four people have died and others were injured after a gunman opened fire at a teenage birthday party in a southern US town, police and officials said on Sunday. local media.
The shootings occurred around 10:30 p.m. Saturday (03:30 GMT Sunday) in Dadeville, a small town in Alabama, local authorities said in a statement, without indicating whether a suspect was in custody.
The motive also remains to be clarified, but the investigators believe that an altercation led to this tragedy, according to the local channel WRBL.
The shots targeted a downtown venue where a teenage girl was celebrating her sixteenth birthday, the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper said.
Her brother, a high school student, was among those killed, their grandmother told the daily.
“
Violent crimes have no place in our state
,” responded Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, expressing her “
pain
” on Twitter.
The Republican claimed to be "
Kept informed
" by the police.
A press conference is scheduled for Sunday morning.
Two dead in Louisville
Read alsoUnited States: according to a study, one in five Americans has in his family a member who died by firearm
The United States pays a very heavy price for the spread of firearms in its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
Saturday evening, other shootings left at least two dead and four injured in a park in Louisville, Kentucky (east central), according to local police.
It is in this city that a young man had opened fire on Monday in the bank which employed him, killing five people.
He had broadcast images of the attack live on the internet.
In late March, a person opened fire at a private elementary school in Nashville, neighboring Tennessee, killing three 9-year-old children and three employees before being shot dead by police.
The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants: one in three adults owns at least one weapon and nearly one in two adults lives in a home where there is a weapon.
The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of firearm deaths in the United States, unmatched by that of other developed countries.
From now on, the number of victims must be particularly large or the circumstances particularly striking for them to arouse national media interest.
Recent American history is indeed punctuated by killings, without any place of daily life seeming safe, from the company to the church, from the supermarket to the discotheque, from the public highway to public transport commmon.